Raap said:
Is it probable that damage-lasers will become part of regular warfare in the future? Or do they require too much power for low amounts of damage compared to bombs, grenades and projectile weapons?
As open minded as I like to be, lasers are not going to offer any improvement in terms of someone walking round with one anytime soon.
You can't simply point a laser at something and have it slice through it like it does in the films. The laser heats the object and a jet of gas blows the material out the way. You can't have long range, precise jets of gas. Pointing even a huge industrial laser at a human would just burn their skin; that'd be against the conventions for weapons production. A more realistic use would be to shine a bright green laser in their eyes to temporarily blind them. Again, if you do actually blind them, that's against the conventions.
Laser are generally not efficient, some of them produce a percent or so of output for their input. The beam could easily be deflected with mirrors or absorbed by moisture & debris in the air. Setting fire to things, releasing smoke would soak it up.
About the only serious use for them at the moment is shooting big projectiles out the air. Although, you're back with issues like targeting and absorption. The equipment is also power hungry and significantly more delicate than a standard weapon.
These apply for a great number of the weapons the government is presently wasting your money on via research grants. Anything that requires electricity to power it is probably going to be a waste of time for now.
Batteries store power ionically, they are at a massive energy disadvantage in regards to the chemical storage of an explosive. There are big losses in conduction and conversion to kenetics and you need special equipment to generate it. Explosives in bullets can be made in bulk, cheaply, they work simply and producing kenetic energy is basically their nature; they don't need taming into it.
Furthermore, it's okay to splatter holes through people or blow them to bits, and it's easy to produce a huge amount of power to do that by putting the explosive in a casing. A shiny surface or smoke will not absorb a bullet.
The most lasers that currently work in a military sense also use a chemical reaction to generate the beam, not electrical discharge. The reaction requires special equipment, quite a lot of careful handling and reactants.
So no, nothing electronic is going to realistically replace good old bullets and bombs for a long time.
A bullet is cheap, easy to make and works perfectly well in virtually every circumstance.
The only time high tech, star trek style weapons will appear is when they have nuclear or anti-matter batteries in them. That's the only way you'll keep up with explosives in terms of output. I am sure that the government is presently working on some form of weapon based on this, an anti-matter bomb for example. They will have spent a lot of money designing some facility, somewhere in an attempt to optimize anti-matter production for this purpose. It's the next atomic bomb, only with a lot of additional possibilities.
The future of weapons is automation, fuzzy logic and swarm intelligence. This is currently under the guise of intelligence gathering. We'll wait and see how that works out. Detachment from murder. Personally, I have a very bad feeling about where we could go with this solider saving technology.
Mk said:
Very cool, does anybody have any info on building laser microphones?
The CIA and other people have used laser microphones. They're not quite as simple as bouncing the beam off a window, they use interference patterns.
They're generally quite complex and, with the advent of double and triple glazing, probably significantly harder to use or even make function.
Kazza said:
What is the minimum wattage for a steel cutting laser?
The wattage depends on how rapidly the energy is lost from the steel and how quickly you want to cut it.
In general, a laser table will be at least 1kW. The faster, more expensive ones can be multiples of that. And they use about ten times more in electricity. With the table costing about a quarter to half a million dollars to buy and then pouring through the juice, they're not a cheap thing to get setup or run. Adding on the cost of replacement optics and gas for the nozzle is also something to think about, as well as tube servicing and replacement.
Once you have a few kW, the thickness doesn't really matter. The operator will usually change the nozzle to one with a different focal length and run the program slower.
Cutting anything other than sheet on a laser is generally a very, very bad idea in terms of cost.
A flame table will cut through ten or more inches of steel quickly and cheaply. The result can be put through a mill if it needs to be precise. It'll come out more accurate than the laser will manage. You could probably buy the flame table and mill for less than the laser, and produce a more accurate result quicker and cheaper. Plasma is another option, although not as good as flame for work over an inch or so.
Similar rules apply to waterjets as to lasers. Jets are much better in terms of cutting strange materials. Like ceramics.
To make a laser table realistically affordable, you need to have it running 24/7 doing jobs for a whole bunch of people. The present economic environment means manufacturing is being hit hard anyway. The slightest error in tuning a manufacturing process, unnecessarily using a laser for example, will wipe out the profit margin and your business.
Punch pressing is also a big competitor for laser cutting sheet.
You can DIY a lot of gas lasers. Look at Sams Laser FAQ (google it). It has just about everything you'll find on the net about DIY lasers. You'll never produce something worthy of commercial cutting of steel at home, but you can make a bunch of colorful lasers that would be fun if you're into bright LEDs and lights.
